XtraFinder – TotalFinder Alternative

Some time ago I wrote a popular post on Finder replacements or alternatives on OS X. In that post I recommended TotalFinder as a great addition to Finder. It added things like tabs, and other handy features. Of course Mavericks has tabs built right in (Apple finally caught on). If you’ve not updated to Mavericks (I haven’t) and you don’t want to dish out money for TotalFinder, here’s a great alternative.

It’s called XtraFinder. It’s free, and it works fine according to my use of it. I have ceased using TotalFinder and switched to XtraFinder.

Hi Aaron,
All search functionality in OS X is performed via Spotlight. As you have discovered, Spotlight doesn’t deal with the * wildcard.
But there is another way. If you want to find all PNG files, just type ‘png’ into the Spotlight search box (either Spotlight in the main system menubar, or in the Find field in Finder (top right corner).
You will then be presented with a dropdown of options. One of those will be in a section called “Kinds” and the available option will be “Portable Network Graphics Image”. Just select that, and you’ve got the equivalent of ‘*.png’.
Of course, you can now add other search attributes to the search, to help refine things. Let’s say you’re looking for a PNG image modified today. You would take the previously mentioned step, but then add ‘today’ to the Search field, and it will give you a Date option called “Today”. Select that, and now you’re searching for PNG files that have today’s date on them.
An alternative is to download a free tool like Tembo, found at http://www.houdah.com
Their paid app Houdahspot is also very useful.

It’s meant to be compatible with 10.9, and I don’t see any people on macupdate.com complaining about it not working. Perhaps it’s something problematic with your OS X installation? Not sure. Sorry I can’t be more help.